e she drifts
from settlement work to domestic science, from domestic science to a
dancing club and the golf links. She gives herself to the current and
the wind and _drifts_. She needs an anchor. She needs the strong will of
another to steady her while she is developing her own. She needs a great
ideal to guide her and hold her with the magnetic power of some North
Star. She needs to have her ambition aroused and to be made to believe
that she, as truly as any one in the world has a "call to serve." She
needs to have great things expected and demanded of her.

The power which rescues the drifting girl is a power outside herself. It
may be a call from the bank of the stream which causes her to pick up
her oars and leave the current, at the call of danger, in answer to a
cry for help; in times of sorrow and illness, many a drifting girl has
come ashore and rendered noble service. Those who thought they knew her
looked on with unconcealed surprise and said to one another, "I didn't
think she had it in her." Yes, it was in her. There, undreamed of by
those who saw her drifting. The drifting girl has within her all the
possibilities. That is the pity of it. As she drifts she may lose oars,
chart and compass and in the stress of the storm that is bound to come
be carried out into the sea of darkness, or be wrecked upon the shoals
or sandbars that line the stream of life.

A wise teacher, awakened parents, a good friend, a live church, a great
book, these have the opportunity of pulling the girl out of the current,
and steadying her until she fastens her life to the Ideal which can hold
her.

I can see now the plain, dreamy face and great black eyes of the girl of
whom parents and relatives said as they looked at her, "What will she
ever amount to?" Their faces betrayed their own conviction that she
would amount to nothing. She tried piano but concluded that the training
necessary to make her a teacher would take too long and took up
stenography. After a few weeks she decided that she was unfitted for the
work and would rather be a nurse. Some weeks were spent at home just
thinking about it, then she began her training. At the end of the period
of probation she left--she knew she could never be a nurse. She spent
the days reading, sewing a little, taking pictures in the woods and
along the shore near her home and tinting them. She drifted through the
months, through a year. One day she posed a group of children, watched
her